-English translation of article- (Italian and Spanish available at website)

Book Review

This first volume of the seminar on Zarathustra, just published by Boringhieri, opens with an intense digression on Zoroastrianism and on Iranian religion, capable of inventing the fundamental distinction between good and evil which then passed to the West through the mediation of Christianity. The comparison with religion and its dogmas is continuous. Why was Nietzsche obsessed by Christianity?

Nietzsche is seized by the delirium of the Redeemer, Jung argues, and yet is unaware of the inner problems that led him to develop a doctrine which has greatly influenced the culture and politics of the twentieth century. The minute he states that 'God is dead', without realizing the profound religiosity of his statement, he is in the midst of the 'archetype of rebirth'.

Tomas wrote:-English translation of article- (Italian and Spanish available at website)

Book Review

This first volume of the seminar on Zarathustra, just published by Boringhieri, opens with an intense digression on Zoroastrianism and on Iranian religion, capable of inventing the fundamental distinction between good and evil which then passed to the West through the mediation of Christianity. The comparison with religion and its dogmas is continuous. Why was Nietzsche obsessed by Christianity?

Though I can speak, (and understand others' in the same) Spanish somewhat fluently, I had a friend from Costa Rica translate the Spanish-version of the book review to me. Out came a whole different meaning. I erred in high school by taking a year of French instead of Spanish. Life was so much tamer, then.

Siezed by a redeeming god! Nietzsche was captured in his processes much like a religious zealot! In complete resistance to and yet so wound up in!

If one proposes that a god had died, it immediately introduces the possibility of a rebirth of that god. And if that is true, Nietzsche can be understood as the Prophet of that New Birth. On another level (and dealing with ole Jung)(get it: Old Young!) you'd be automatically considering the unconscious element...and a 'god' that lives and acts even separately from our 'conscious minds', and in this way that god and a whole other level of theology and a way of doing theology is opened up.

While I doubt that a Spanish translation would render a new text, still the reading of a text you are familiar with in another language will tend to open up hidden elements.

If Jung would have bothered reading on a bit, he might have understood the "god is dead" statement was all about solving the murder and bringing of good tidings. That is: the puzzle of finding the remains and other traces and getting to the motives of the murderer. The nature of the deceased is less of a mystery than the hole left by the disappearing. Most of Nietzsche's work revolves around this theme really. Jean Baudrillard went a few steps further with for example the analysis in this book The Perfect Crime about how Reality would have been murdered (or more accurately how a vital illusion was destroyed by producing a specific type of hyperreality).

With Jung and many other psycho-analysts you often notice the problem of Maslow's hammer. The interesting paradox offered by Nietzsche was the idea that the very attempt of religion to mediate between earth and heavens resulted in the increasing occlusion of those same heavens. Religion becoming the opposite of stated intentions and a vehicle for all kinds of less pretty drives trying to stay out of the daylight. And all that religion wrought in modern society but will "go under" as well as it cannot thrive without an eye in the sky, even when it thinks it can.

Though peculiarly, along with Jung, comes Eliade, and with Eliade whole ('new') dimensions of living out the god-relationship. Which again brings me back to you: what happened in your spiritual life? Did your Christianity remain always intellectual, doctrinal, rational? Or were you 'taken up in the spirit'? And when you woke up from whatever that was, did you 'retreat back into intellection' or did.you dive down again into ... what shall we call it? Matters of the soul, matters of the soul-body ... those zones of initiation.and fully immersed learning which (in my book anyway) produces wisdom?

Personally, I was caused to go the 'Eliade' route. The rebirth was and still very much is 'one of the most important things' and that [and all this connotes] is why I have so little in common with QRS and their whole trip.

The significance of Nietzsche's statement "God is dead" can only be determined when you imagine what Nietzsche meant by God. We need some definitions, but we make those definitions with a consideration for Nietzsche's psychology. Consider how the man had super human insight into the human mind, and then you might open up to the possibility that there were practical, zen-like reasons for his definitions.

From my view, he was referring to the God of Jesus - "the all". And yes, the Christian's of his time killed the God of Jesus and replaced it with some anthropocentric model that had no resemblance to the initial idea of Jesus. Hence Nietzsche's statement, "God is dead, we killed him". Very few Nietzsche commentators understand this.

Nietzsche, arguably, designed his work as an iconoclastic corrective to breath some life into his people, so that they could live fully, with virility. That way, they could approach Christianity rationality, in a Kierkegaardian manner.

Just imagine if you want an overweight man to climb a dangerous mountain. Instead of instructing him to the top, first you seduce him to get in shape. Get him lifting weights, running, conquering small things. After he has a taste of all the small, but important things through masculine endeavours, then he is in the position to approach Christianity.

I would put it almost oppositely: he 'wanted' (predicted, preached) the death of an all-so-abstract transcendent god---who is born from such an idea as The All--- in favor of a radical immanence (your 'virility' I am supposing).

"That we find no God---either in history or in nature or behind nature---is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as 'god-like' but as miserable, as.absurd, as.harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life".

'God' dies but the body comes back to life (resurrection).

"Before God! But now this God has died. You higher men, this god was your greatest danger. It is only since he lies in his tomb that you have been resurrected. Only now the great moon comes; only now the higher man becomes---lord."

Talking Ass wrote: The rebirth was and still very much is 'one of the most important things' and that [and all this connotes] is why I have so little in common with QRS and their whole trip.

But rebirths are part and parcel of our existence. This is why in Buddhism the bhavacakra came up, the wheel of cyclic existence. One is always being reinvented, in or out some transformation, growing with slower and faster rates and so on. Naturally rebirth has become a major theme, a thread of all our personal stories. And yet there are major and minor transformations in every realm. But do we really want to go into that? Because the significance of a particular rebirth lies thoroughly embedded inside a context as you always are ready to point out. It's very hard to understand from the outside in. And yet you seem to desire to know these third party transformations, their effects - while at the same time referring rather mysteriously to some rebirth of your self.

A certain rare ripeness of "soul", I suppose, precedes the realization that change is happening with various speeds in various settings simultaneously. And yet we don't always pick up on them. Some we do face full on and are then sometimes noted as "mystical magical shifts" or something of the kind. But they are profoundly relative. Of course.

One of the themes of my posts lately is the idea of rebirths and journeys happening metaphysically as processes within perception. Sometimes we take part, sometimes it's just too large or too little for that. Is this vision shared? That all sorts and forms of ideas, thoughts, events, feelings and experiences which happen at various scales of life are very much rebirths too?

I brought up Eliade as one who explored all the inner dimensions of the content of religious myths. I personally believe there is a link between the 'death' of a whole [mistaken, erroneous, petering out] energy-spring for organizing human cultural and social life that has come to the end of its road, and the 'rebirth' of new relationships to life and meaning. That is where my present theological investigations are leading me. Essentially, as I go back over everything I lived, I need hermeneutical tools to deal with the 'metaphysics' as you say of life lived and perceptions-lived.

That all sorts and forms of ideas, thoughts, events, feelings and experiences which happen at various scales of life are very much rebirths too?

I would assume so. But to clarify my own use of the term 'rebirth' and 'ressurection': I give it essentially the most spiritual twist of all, but that also means strictly an immanent sense as the most radical inversion of the categorie spirituelle.

It feels somewhat overmuch to say also that 'rebirth' also connotes [necessitates?] involvement in service, be it in the Christian the Buddhist of the Vedanta sense. I think this is where the first 'shearing off' occurs: to have lost sight of connection 'to all the souls' and to be propelled into self-serving modes. So, rebirth is also 'adulthood'.